Traditionally, video content, such as movies, television shows, etc., has been pre-edited to include “advertisement breaks” for subsequent insertion of advertisements into the content by broadcasters. As referred to herein, an “advertisement break” or “ad break” is an identified point, range of timecodes, or range of frames within a video file or sequence for inserting an advertisement. These ad breaks typically comprise blacked-out portions of the video content, indicating to a broadcaster an appropriate location for including an advertisement or group of advertisements. Some ad breaks are short (e.g., ¾ of a second) and merely indicate an insertion point at which an ad can be spliced into the video. Other ad breaks, however, are longer (possibly several minutes or more), thereby requiring several ads to be recorded or played over the ad break.
Historically, a video program signal would be embedded with “cue tones” identifying the advertisement breaks in the respective video. Generally, a cue tone comprises a dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) type of tone used as a method of in-band signaling by cable television broadcasters to indicate start and stop times of local commercial or advertisement insertion points. Thus, when broadcasting a traditional form of video content, such as a television program, broadcasters were able to detect the cue tones in the program signal and insert advertisements accordingly. Depending on the specific signal, broadcaster, or recorded video content, the cue tone could be a short tone, indicating the beginning and/or end of a break, or it could be a longer tone that lasted throughout an entire break.
With the transition into the “digital age”, more and more forms of multimedia content are being digitized and subsequently viewed or played via the Internet, on a mobile device (e.g., a cell phone or mobile media player), or via some other digital display device. To comply with digital broadcast requirements, content that was originally recorded in non-digital format requires conversion to a digital file, such as an MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, or other similar type of file. Thus, vast amounts of previously-existing video content have been converted from prior formats into digitized format.
Once videos have been digitized, however, the originally-embedded cue tones that identified the advertisement breaks in the videos are no longer perceptible by a digital video player. Thus, these videos may include several undetectable blacked out portions corresponding to pre-inserted ad breaks. When a video containing such advertisement breaks is displayed to a viewer, the viewer is forced to watch or manually fast forward through each ad break. Accordingly, it is desirable to locate the ad breaks in the video so that they can be extracted from the video or automatically skipped during video broadcasting, thereby enabling uninterrupted playing of the video (i.e., no blacked-out portions). Further, it is beneficial to digital video publishers to identify these ad breaks so that advertisements can be included at appropriate locations in the video during a digital broadcast (i.e., so that the ad breaks in digital videos can be used for their originally-intended purpose—inserting and presenting commercials or advertisements).
In addition to identifying pre-inserted ad breaks in digitized videos, some broadcasters or video content users wish to identify other potential ad breaks not originally identified. Historically, ad breaks were inserted during the cut, or change, from one scene to another as chosen during assemblage of the video sequence. However, some video content publishers wish to include advertisements in non-traditional locations of the video, ineffective of a scene change. For example, within a given scene in a video there may be camera shot changes or other transitions in which it may be appropriate to insert an advertisement. Determination of additional and/or different ad locations within the video sequence removes restraint on the placement of advertisements so that they are no longer bound by broadcast norms. Accordingly, identification of these locations in a video file would be advantageous for many video content users.
For these and many other reasons, there is a continuing need for a system or method that identifies or detects pre-inserted or preselected advertisement breaks in digital video files or sequences for manipulation or removal of those advertisement breaks for video viewing purposes. There is a further need for a system or method that identifies other, non-preselected locations in videos that may be appropriate for insertion of advertisements.